The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  She’d only told Alice, whose practical expression of sympathy was to induce her to join her keep-fit class. It was run by a lady in Crosspool, a nice girl called Tracy Bowness, who said she’d been at school with Francis and—a polite little afterthought, turning from Alice’s glowing face to her own—with Tim, too, she thought. She rented the church hall by the term—she had some connection with the church—and got them all going for 50p a lesson, or “session,” as they said. She was very good, with an array of legwarmers and a large range of different-coloured all-in-one leotards as the weeks went on. She hadn’t left home, and kept house for her dad, who was a mine-manager—you weren’t supposed to know that, but they all did. Her mother had gone off with a teacher from Flint, years before, run off to Exeter with him. You weren’t supposed to know any of that, but they did, and it added a degree of sympathy to the enjoyment of the class. Poor Tracy, with nothing but her legwarmers to keep her warm, with her Kept-Fit figure and spoony unkissable features. They all knew she had nothing but a grumpy old mine-manager of a dad in a little house in Crosspool to go home to.

  Alice was in Katherine’s kitchen, the cherry blossom thick in clouds just at the window, when the news came. She was drinking a cup of coffee. Tim had gone out somewhere very early. They’d been woken by the front door slamming, before seven o’clock. “Heaven knows where,” Katherine said, though Malcolm—who was for some reason still in at ten o’clock on a weekday—said he could guess. That was mysterious to Alice, as Malcolm greeted her amicably enough and went off upstairs. The telephone rang, above their heads and in the hallway. They’d installed a Trimphone extension in Malcolm’s study, directly above the kitchen, and they heard the sound of his voice saying their number rather than the actual words, “double one double six?” in a tune with a rising inflection. There was another comment, a silence, then another rumbling, unintelligible and short sentence, before he called, “Katherine—it’s important,” and came out of the little study.

  She went to the phone in the hall and picked it up, listening, whitefaced. Malcolm hung up the phone upstairs, and came down. Alice, following Katherine, made a quick tactful gesture of leaving in Malcolm’s direction, but Katherine saw this. She reached out to grip her wrists. Malcolm, more weakly, shook his hands and pointed at the ground, to say, “No, stay here.” Whether Malcolm knew that Alice had been told the facts of the case or not, he wanted her here.

  There was nothing to be gathered from Katherine’s short, neutral sentences, hunched over the phone with the wings of her hair hiding the secret of the Trimphone handset. Malcolm led Alice into the kitchen.

  “It’s the solicitor,” he said calmly. “She’s phoning to give us an update on the case.”

  Alice noted that “us.” “Good news, I hope,” she said, words that even she knew would probably sound even more fatuous. And then they started talking, in the agreed social manner of those days, about the miners’ strike and the weather. Started talking about them in connection, too, as if they had anything to do with each other, as if the miners, on top of everything else, had managed to arrange lovely weather for their strike. Alice and Malcolm did it on this occasion with graceful, pointed practice, as if the whole of their social intercourse over the last few decades had prepared them to carry out exactly this difficult conversation, even with a more difficult one happening in the hallway on the Trimphone. But, all the same, they broke off as soon as she put the phone down and straightened up.

  Katherine came into the kitchen with elaborate casualness. She was sometimes so much like a small girl, Alice considered. Not like her own daughter Jane, whose body had always had that gawky frankness that never mounted much of a defence or dissimulation of her own thoughts. When fed-up, Jane drooped; when happy, she perked up; when bored (Alice had noted last Christmas when they went over there for drinks), she still sighed and moaned and rolled her eyes. Katherine was more like Alice’s daughter Sandra, who had made a point of complicated poses at odds with her situation or feeling, being upright and staring when she was frightened, looking angry when she was in love and, like Katherine now, draping herself around in casual unconsid-ered shapes when there was something clearly important to be conveyed. Of course, Alice didn’t know whether Sandra still did this; she hadn’t seen her in eighteen months.

  “That was the solicitor,” Katherine said. “Tricia. She was phoning about the case. She was just giving us an update.”

  “Is there any news?” Malcolm said, after a pause.

  “I thought you’d spoken to her,” Katherine said, going to look out of the kitchen window. She turned the kitchen taps on, and started to wash her hands. “Well,” she said, raising her voice, “they’ve decided not to bring charges.”

  “They’re not going to—” Alice said, as Malcolm, simultaneously, said, “Against Nick, you mean?”

  “I don’t know about Nick,” Katherine said. “She didn’t say anything. Of course, she’s not his solicitor. No, she, they, they’re not going to press charges against me. They know I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  At that point, Alice realized that that was how it was always going to be from now on. The moment of frank openness—a short moment, no more, in their lives—like an eye opening and shutting again in sleep, had gone away. Because the news had come when there was an audience, in front of whom pretence had to be kept up: from now on it had never been the case that Katherine had done anything wrong, that she had ever been in danger of being prosecuted and taken to court. Alice could feel the buttress-like projections of the last few weeks dissolving like pissed-on bubble-bath. That was how it was to be.

  “Are they going to prosecute Nick?” Malcolm said, with a visible effort.

  “Well, yes, they are,” Katherine said. She was going now into that style which was almost the first thing Alice had found in her, when they first met; the tiny recoil when an unwelcome and inconvenient question was asked, the tiny beginnings of a party-like smile as if at a personal comment in bad taste from the friend of a guest, brought and welcomed under sufferance. “They must be. Tricia said that they’ll want me as a witness when it comes to court.”

  All this behaviour was mounted for the benefit of an audience. It wasn’t clear, though, who the confidant was, and who the audience before whom appearances had to be kept up. Katherine ought to be pretending that things were as she had expected in front of the neighbour, in front of Alice. In fact, it felt much more as if she was protecting Malcolm from the full knowledge of the scenario. There was now no hope that she would ever be honest with either of them, or anyone, about what she had once so clearly feared. She had been let off; and from now on, Alice knew, should she ever again mention the fact of Katherine’s affair with, her feelings for Nick, she would be greeted with that faint party-like smile and twitch of surprise, and a change of subject. None of it had ever happened.

  “They couldn’t find anything to pin on her,” Bernie observed, later that night, as they were getting ready for bed. He took off his string vest, dropping it in the bedside laundry basket, and then his old watch with an unhooking gesture. He laid it carefully on the bedside table next to the alarm clock. He sneezed, and shivered in his pyjama bottoms, string-tied at the waist. He rubbed his sides.

  “I don’t think there’s anything there to pin on her,” Alice said, sitting up in bed, looking over her book—she’d been reading The Far Pavilions for four weeks now, persevering with it; handling seemed to have increased its bulk by half as much again. “She didn’t know anything about any of it.”

  “She must have wondered,” Bernie said, and sneezed again.

  “I worry that you’re not eating properly,” Alice said. “That’s the fourth night running you’ve come in late and just picked at cold.”

  “It’s nothing, just a summer sniffle,” Bernie said. “It can’t be helped, working late at the moment. I don’t like it any more than you do, you know. It’s not like you to start nagging.”

  “I’m not nagging,” Alice said, aston
ished that Bernie could even think such a thing. It must be his tiredness. “I’m just worried about you, working all the hours God sends. We didn’t move up here so that you could start knocking yourself out like this. You’re working yourself to a frazzle.”

  “Won’t go on for ever,” Bernie said. “They can’t last six months.”

  “Who can’t?”

  “The miners, love,” Bernie said, laughing despite his exhaustion. He never got over how vague Alice could be about what he did at work for the Electric. There was a day, when they’d been married five years, when he actually asked her what she thought they made electricity out of. He’d never do anything so cruel again—it was agonizing, how painful she found the explication of her own ignorance. “I’ll tell you something—if I were Scargill, if I wanted to make things difficult, I wouldn’t have called a strike in spring. Look at the weather—demand for coal’s never been so low.”

  “That’s what Malcolm was saying,” Alice said, cautiously and nervously. “At least they’re having nice weather for their strike.”

  Bernie wondered again, but left it. “So she’s in the clear?” he said.

  “In the clear? Katherine. Yes, I suppose she is,” Alice said, obscurely.

  “They couldn’t pin anything on her, as I say,” Bernie said.

  “Yes,” Alice said. “Yes, that must be right.”

  “So—”

  “What do you mean, so?”

  “What’s on your mind, then? You don’t seem relieved that she’s out of trouble.”

  Alice paused, setting down her book on her lap. That was true. There was some kind of fret tinging her thoughts when she contemplated Katherine’s escape. And there had been something in the constantly maintained dissatisfaction and bewilderment in Katherine’s face that made her think that Katherine, too, couldn’t understand why she wasn’t more relieved. Alice felt that Katherine, much as she loved her, had got away with something that she’d actually done. She hadn’t cooked the books, she wouldn’t know how—Alice often found it difficult to ascribe skills to women she knew that she herself didn’t possess and couldn’t have mastered. But she’d done something wrong, she knew that, and she wasn’t being held to account for it. Where the court was that would judge Katherine, and find her definitively guilty or not guilty, that Alice didn’t know, and understood that Katherine didn’t know either. Those decisions had been promised, and now she was back where she had always been, with the ongoing sensation, not the single redemptive statement of guilt.

  “She’s still got to be a witness,” Alice said.

  “She won’t like that,” Bernie said. “Either sticking up for Nick or owning up to what he’s done. She’d decided she didn’t want anything more to do with him, yeah?”

  “It’s not a pleasant situation,” Alice said.

  “It’s her own fault,” Bernie said. “I don’t know how Malcolm puts up with it, to tell you the truth.”

  “I don’t think he does,” Alice said. “What time do you have to be up in the morning?”

  “Six thirty, love,” Bernie said. “I’m sorry about all this. It’s not going to go on for ever. You should find yourself a nice posh boyfriend with a flower shop, keep yourself busy while your husband’s fannying about and worrying himself to a frazzle over the levels of coal stocks.”

  “That’s not funny,” Alice said, getting out of bed in her summer nightie, frilly and halfway down her thighs. “I’m just going to put my face on,” she said, sitting down at the dressing-table and pulling the jar of cold cream as she always did.

  “Not just yet,” Bernie said, as he always did.

  “Well, all right, then,” Alice said, wondering whether there was anyone else in the world who still went to bed together, meaning, well, went to bed, every night, as the two of them did after thirty years of marriage. She didn’t much care whether anyone else did or not. Good old Bernie.

  “I saw him once,” Bernie said, nuzzling into her neck and taking the hem of her nightie, scrunching it up on either side in his fists, in the way he had. He had lost his pyjama bottoms. She felt the sharp hair on his back and shoulders against the soft skin under her chin as he buried his face in the gap, which, yes, it seemed her neck and shoulder naturally made for it, yes, it did. “I saw him once, her Nick. I went into the shop, and I bought a bunch of flowers. Kept him running around. I was playing the Cockney big-shot, didn’t know what I wanted, might be orchids, might be roses, might be lilies. Couldn’t believe his luck. Running around with his ‘Yes, sir, no, sir, a very wise decision, sir.’ Posh little sod, isn’t he? Not much sense in his face, though. I wouldn’t lend him twenty quid and hope to see it again.”

  “You never brought me flowers home,” Alice said.

  “I’ll tell you why. That’s because I gave them flowers to me girlfriend,” Bernie said.

  “Get off,” Alice said. She didn’t even have to think about it.

  “No, straight up,” Bernie said, but he couldn’t keep it going, and started laughing in the middle of what he was doing, perhaps envisaging the girlfriend he could never have had. “To be honest, what I did, I asked him to make up this bunch of flowers, told him I was just taking a leisurely stroll around the block to collect, I can’t remember what I told him, say it was my dry-cleaning I had to collect. And would he make it up before I got back. Forty-pound bunch of flowers it would have been, like a bleeding wreath. And then I strolled round the block all right, but I strolled round the block to the car and I drove home.”

  “Bernie,” mock-pushing him away, “that’s terrible.”

  “Getting my own back, or not my own back, revenge on Malcolm’s behalf. Husbands sticking together. Little sod.”

  “I still think that’s a terrible thing to do. He’d not done you any harm.”

  “Course, she’d stopped working there by then, or it was her day off or something, she wasn’t there or she’d have recognized me. She’d have known I wasn’t serious. Forty-pound bunch of flowers.”

  “He’d have told her about it—Bernie, hang on, just a second, let me—I said, he’d have told her about it when she came in the next day,” Alice said. “Described you. She’d have known who it was.”

  Because for Alice, there was only one person in the world who could ever have looked like Bernie.

  “I’m not surprised you keep out of her way now,” Alice said.

  “Oh, I don’t care,” Bernie said. “He probably sold the whole bunch to the next mug who came in, anyway.” And, pretty soon, Alice didn’t much care either. There were things that were always worrying Katherine, making herself fret and nag on the other side of the road. There always had been and there always would be. In Bernie’s arms, though he had to get up in seven hours’ time, Alice thought there had never been much reason to join in, and that was the end of it.

  The heat of the morning was turning even Orgreave into an idyllic setting, it seemed. Tim and Stig had been dropped by Trudy, who had hurtled away, hardly even slowing to let them out, and they had taken an indirect route through the little town, not wanting to be seen by any of the groups of policemen gathering at the street corners. They were trying to look as much like sons of the miners living in Orgreave as possible, and dived down one cul-de-sac after another, jumping over back walls and into back ginnels, kicking over dustbins. They only had the faintest idea of where they were going; the coke works was at the far end of the town, they knew, that was all. “Oi!” a woman shouted from her back door, and they jumped over another wall and ran.

  They came to the back end of a cul-de-sac, and paused; there was no one around, but you could feel something brewing nearby in the tension in the air. It was just heat; it was just the pressure of history in the air; it was just the mutter of voices somewhere within a few hundred yards. One of those. Stig straightened in an unsuspicious way, gesturing with his thumb, and in a second, joyously, Tim and Stig were suddenly among what must have been a late group of miners, slipping down against all attempts by the oppressive
forces of the police, and there they were in a crowd of T-shirted and bare-chested miners at the gates of the coke works. There they were.

  On the grassy slopes about the gates to the works were hundreds of idling miners, like seals on a beach, or perhaps like pleasure-makers in a municipal park. It was already hot, and most of them were lazing in the sun; booted and trousered, but in T-shirts, like Tim and Stig, or bare-chested, as if they were sunning and tanning themselves. Tim and Stig walked a little way up the slope, sat down in an empty stretch, reclining back on their elbows. Stig set down his rucksack with the radical leaflets inside; they’d distribute them later. “Who the fuck are they?” Tim heard someone say, and was about to turn his head to stare. Stig murmured, “Don’t look round,” and he was right; some of these people had a weird proprietorial attitude towards their legitimate protest; some even objected to the presence of people like Tim and Stig, directing the ideological aspect of the martial festivities. It didn’t seem to occur to these people that they might be doing the ruling class’s bidding, policing the substance of the protest on their behalf. It didn’t seem to occur to these people that this struggle was not just a battle over pay and conditions, another in the long line of particular protests. This was a battle over the substance of the country, the nature of the land and who owned it, and it was not just for the miners, the card-carriers, to fight, but for the people of the land, all of them, the concerned ones. So if an unenlightened miner said, “Who the fuck are they?” you didn’t turn round. You didn’t turn round and say, “I’m fighting for you, but I’m fighting for everyone, too.” In any case, at the moment, everyone was sitting enjoying the sunshine on the grassy slope, so it would have sounded a bit daft.